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If you’re thinking about becoming a medical assistant, you might know what duties will be expected of you when you land a job, but you might not realize just how much of each duty you’ll be performing each day. Well, thanks to a survey conducted by the American Association of Medical Assistants (AAMA) of almost 4,000 MAs nationwide, you can get a sense of which tasks are likely to be the most prevalent — information that can go a long way to helping you determine if this is the profession for you.

Let’s Get Clinical

Although you might expect medical assistants’ responsibilities to be split evenly between the clinical and the administrative, the AAMA survey revealed that 72% of their time is devoted to clinical duties, with clerical tasks accounting for only 25% of their time.

Another survey, this one on a smaller scale — consisting of the 239 students who graduated from the City University of New York (CUNY) medical assistant programs in the decade between the 1999-2000 and 2009-2010 academic years — concurred with these findings. In the CUNY report, 74% of respondents reported spending more than half of the time at their medial assistant jobs performing clinical duties — including about 21% who said they spent ALL of their time on clinical tasks. On the other hand, only 39% of graduates reported spending more than half of their time on administrative responsibilities — including about 10% who spent all of their time on administrative tasks.

The Numbers

So, which specific duties are you most likely to be spending your days doing? According to the AAMA survey, these are the most widely performed clinical responsibilities, in order of prevalence (along with the percentage of respondents who said they routinely do these tasks):

Obtain patient history and vital signs (89%)

Assist with patient exams (83%)

Injections (73%)

EKGs (53%)

Laboratory (50%)

Venipuncture (47%)

Other diagnostic testing (42%)

X-rays (10%)

Start IVs (5%)

And these the the most prevalent administrative/managerial responsibilities, in order (with the percentage of respondents who do these tasks):